


well I have brittle bones it seems

by notsafeforowls



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Hank Heywood's A+ Parenting, Hemophilia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-02
Updated: 2018-04-02
Packaged: 2019-04-17 12:22:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14188893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notsafeforowls/pseuds/notsafeforowls
Summary: Nate’s life can be defined by a series of wants: friends, fun, his dad to actually talk to him, courage, knowledge, a relationship and, most of all, adventure.





	well I have brittle bones it seems

**5.**

“What are we going to do?”

 

“I don’t know. What if he gets hurt at school? What if he gets hurt when he’s playing again? We don’t even know how long he was bleeding when he told us.”

 

“What if one of the other children pushes him over and he hits his head?”

 

It hadn’t even hurt. Nate had heard their neighbour saying that it was just a graze, then the doctor. That was a good word. It sounded little. But there had been a lot of blood. There had been so much blood that he’d cried even though it didn’t hurt.

 

“What’s going to happen when he’s older? We don’t even know how bad it is yet – he’ll never be a soldier, but will he even be able to lead a normal life?”

 

His mom had cried. His dad had kept asking why he didn’t tell them. They’d taken him to the hospital, and the doctors had prodded and poked him for a long time. Then they’d injected him with something. His parents had left with one of the doctors after that.

 

Nate picked at the bandage on his knee. There was a purple bruise visible around the edges.

 

 

 

**8.**

 

The first time Nate noticed that he was alone, he was eight and at the annual family picnic.

 

He wasn’t _alone, alone_ though, because all of his aunts and uncles were sitting at the two picnic tables on either side of the two that the kids had been ordered to sit at, and his mom and dad were close, and his cousins (so many he didn’t remember half of their names) were playing football with his uncles.

 

But he wasn’t playing with anyone. Nobody had even asked him to, not that he was allowed to.

 

Last year, Zachary had asked him to play because he was six and didn’t know that Nate wasn’t allowed to run or shove or climb or any of the things that everyone else gets to do every year, and Augustus had laughed at Zachary, and called him stupid, and said, “Don’t you know Nate’s sick?”

 

His dad had spent all day playing with his cousins and saying things like _Augustus is going to go pro_ and _Nicholas sure is fast nowadays_ , and he hadn’t even spoken to Nate since he sat him down with a pile of books that Nate had already read. It wasn’t as if Nate really wanted to play with them – his cousins were _mean_ , like the kids on those TV shows his grandma watched when she babysat him at the weekend – but he wanted to talk to his dad.

 

He was too old for the bedtime stories now, and this was supposed to be family time, right? And Augustus and Zachary and Nicholas and everyone else were running around and getting cheered on by their parents.

 

And his mom and dad had been talking about him last night. His mom had said _you need to_ _spend more time with him, Hank_ and his dad had shouted _I don’t know_ what _to do with him_ in that voice that meant he hadn’t meant to shout.

 

“Are you okay, honey?” his mom asked, sitting down beside him and putting her arm around him. And Nate smiled (because he knew that was the best way to stop her from getting upset) even though he didn’t really want to. “Have you finished your book again?”

 

“Isn’t that a bit old for him?” Aunt Cassandra asked, squinting at the cover of Treasure Island. “I spent all last year having to force Zachary to read that for school.”

 

“Oh, no, Nathaniel’s years ahead when it comes to his reading. Did I tell you that I found him in his father’s study last week? Hank flipped his lid, but Nathaniel was reading one of those dry old history books, and I told him ‘ _well, maybe if you read them yourself then he wouldn’t think they were his for the taking_.’” She pulled Nate a little closer in a one-armed hug. “I don’t know what you found so interesting about Pompeii, but I’m glad someone is finally making use of those books!”

 

Nate watched his dad hug Augustus and said, “Everything was covered in ash but they found people frozen there.”

 

 

 

**11**

Nate had never hated anyone as much as he hated Shane. He didn’t like his cousin Gus, and he didn’t like chemistry homework, but he’d rather do chemistry homework with Gus for an entire year than spend five minutes with Shane.

 

Shane was rude. Shane liked to get kids on the way to the bus stop and steal their lunch money. But only little kids, never the ones who were big enough and strong enough to fight back. It hurt when he snuck up behind Nate and pinched his arms to make them bruise, but Nate was used to bruises. He didn’t like bullies, especially not ones who picked on little kids.

 

As he walked down the street, Nate touched the dog tags around his neck to make sure they were still there. His grandfather had beat up the bullies of the world and, if Nate couldn’t do that, then he’d teach the bully next door a lesson. He watched Shane leave his house and immediately go after one of the younger kids. The boy was only about eight. Nate ran the rest of the way down the street, pushing in between the two of them.

 

“Leave him alone, Shane!” Nate snapped.

 

Shane only grinned at him.

 

“Go home before you hurt yourself.”

 

Nate didn’t really think as he raised his hand, but punching someone was harder than the movies made it look, and Shane grabbed his hand easily and pushed him back. Nate stumbled, fell hard on his backside, and looked up just in time for Shane’s fist to catch him right on the nose.

 

Once. Twice. Three times. The world went bright. Pain shot across his face. Blood. There was so much blood. Nate couldn’t breathe.

 

“I told you that you’d hurt yourself,” was all Shane said.

 

 

**13**

Nate snuck out of the house. He climbed out his window, slid down the drainpipe (like an _action hero_ , he thought, heart pounding and he almost lost his grip on the pipe) and ran to the bus stop.

 

It was the bravest, most exciting thing he’d done in his entire life, and Nate decided ten seconds after thinking that thought that he was never going to tell anyone that, even if they put a gun to his head.

 

He almost fell half a dozen times, and he could hardly breathe by the time he got there, just in time to catch the right bus, but it was late enough that not too many people were out ( _the ones out are the cool kids_ , Nate thought, _the ones who have friends and go to parties, and all the things Mom and Dad won’t let me do._ ) Nate paid the fare (too much) and spent the entire ride into town clutching the flyer in one hand, his ticket money in the other.

 

 

 

“He’s kinda cute.”

 

“Do you know him?”

 

“I’ve never seen him before. Do you think he goes to another school?”

 

“Maybe he’s new around here.”

 

The whispers followed Nate as he bought his ticket, refusing the change with a smile. It was the last of his birthday money and if his parents found the change then they’d wonder what he’d been buying that they didn’t know about.

 

He thought about telling them that he didn’t go to their school because he was home-schooled. He thought about telling them that he was new in town, like kids did in his grand’s soap operas, because they were both really pretty, even if they were a few years older and Nate didn’t think they’d even look at him.

 

But the words wouldn’t come out when he tried to open his mouth, so Nate didn’t say anything to them. He found a seat in the middle (it was where the best seats were, according to the magazine he’d bought last week) and folded up the flyer as small as he could, sinking as far into the seat as he could.

 

And when the movie started, Nate forgot all about the girls (now sitting a few seats away from him), and let himself get lost in the adventures of an archaeologist who got to do all the things that Nate’s grandfather had done in the stories he’d been listening to for years, all the things that Nate wasn’t allowed to do.

 

When the credits rolled, Nate stayed in his seat as everyone else left. Maybe he couldn’t have adventures like that (maybe no one will ever let him) but he could learn about things like that. And history had always been his second best subject.

 

And if he spent the bus ride home wishing he had someone to talk to about the movie, then it’s just because it was _that_ good.

 

 

**15**

 

The house wasn’t supposed to be empty, but his gran had to leave early to pick up a package before the post office closed, and Nate’s parents were supposed to be home soon anyway, so she’d left him at the dining table with the math homework he’d already finished and was using to cover up one of his grandfather’s old books on Egyptology.

 

He’d stayed there until he’d heard the gate close outside, then he’d gone upstairs.

 

Nate swung his legs back and forth, drumming his fingers on his dad’s desk. He liked to sit on it rather than at it, an extra serving of rebellion on top of the fact that he wasn’t supposed be in there in the first place.

 

_“You want to be a what? I’m not so sure that’s a good idea. Don’t they have to travel?”_

 

_“Nathaniel, put that down.”_

_“Oh, my God, are you okay? Are you bleeding? Do you need to go to the hospital?”_

_“Nathaniel, behave yourself.”_

_“Honey, you’ll hurt yourself.”_

_“Nathaniel, listen to your mother.”_

He was sick of being told what to do. Sick of his mom following him around like she was scared he would die if she looked away for too long. Sick of being the only person in the neighbourhood who was _home-schooled._ Nate knew what he could and couldn’t do, and the long list of things that he wasn’t supposed to do.

 

Sick of _Nathaniel_ this and _Nathaniel_ that.

 

It wasn’t like Nate was six anymore – he was fifteen now, he was not going to hit his head and forget to tell anyone. The last time his mom hadn’t freaked out about him going anywhere for longer than an hour was when he’d gone grocery shopping. Fucking _grocery shopping_.

 

She’d freaked out six months ago when she’d found the ticket for the cinema and had realised what he’d done to get there. She’d shouted at him for half an hour about how dangerous it had been, how he could have been hurt, how he could have slipped on the way out or in and been seriously injured. Nate had made all the right noises, but a bit of him had been thrilled at the knowledge that he’d done it and _hadn’t_ got hurt.

 

Nate turned the page as he heard the door open downstairs. Heavy footsteps, his dad doing his usual trip around the ground floor. Keys in the dish by the door; coat on the hook on the other side of the door; into the kitchen for a glass of water, and so on.

 

This chapter was about Egyptian literature and Nate loved it. It was some of the oldest literature in the world, old enough that Nate had needed to take an idea from a documentary and draw out a timeline to _really_ feel how old it was. He wondered what it would be like to see some of these books in person, not in sketches or even photographs in these books. The really cool ones weren’t on display in museums; they were in private exhibits and collections and museums way cooler than the little one in the city centre.

 

His mom still laughed and wondered what Nate saw in history before the war, or why he had any interest in the Lower Paleolithic period ( _dear, when I was your age, I didn’t know there_ were _upper or lower ones_ ) and she definitely didn’t get why he liked the Middle Ages (he preferred the High and the Late Middle Ages to the Early Middle Ages), but she bought him books he wouldn’t have been able to afford even if he saved his allowance, and let him take ones from his father’s study.

 

One day, Nate swore, he was going to study in another country, far away from this town, far away from kids in the neighbourhood who only knew him as ‘the weird home-schooled kid’ and far away from people who wrapped him in cotton wool so thick that it suffocated him.

 

“Again, Nathaniel?” his father sighed as he opened the door, and Nate looked up from the book.

 

He didn’t even look at Nate as he walked around the desk to put his briefcase down, and Nate was suddenly struck by the fact that he couldn’t even remember the last time his dad had _really_ looked at him.

 

He couldn’t remember the last time they had hugged. He couldn’t remember the last time his dad had spent any time alone with him that didn’t involve his mom leaving them alone together and his dad looking at him like he didn’t know what to do with him. In fact, Nate realised, the last time he could really remember spending any time with his dad was when he had still been small enough for the bedtime stories about his grandfather.

 

It felt like something broke. That was the only way Nate could describe it, and it made his breath catch in his chest until he could hardly manage to say, “Yeah, again. Hank.”

 

And _Hank’s_ head snapped up, his attention suddenly on Nate for the first time in years, but Nate was already up off the desk, still clutching the book, and he ignored the way that Hank shouted after him.

 

 

 

**17**

 

College was freedom.

 

College was moving halfway across the country, ignoring his parents’ calls (he called his mom on Mondays when he knows that Hank won’t be there, and apologised) and staying up until the sun rose, sitting in an uncomfortable chair, his heels pressed against the edge of the seat, with a book balanced carefully on his knees.

 

Even half the people on his course didn’t get the appeal of trying to learn _everything_.

 

“Just learn what’s in the old exam papers,” Thomas yawned one Sunday while Nate sat in his pajamas at the kitchen table and read through a book as thick as his fist. “Go to a party, or get laid, or just makes friends, jeez.”

 

Nate laughed a little at that, because really? That wasn’t going to happen unless someone magically gave him memories and social skills that he’d missed out on in the decade plus that his family had wrapped him in cotton wool.

 

He’d tried – he really had, but he’d given up after the first month after he’d agreed to go to a party and drunkenly (his first time drinking) demanded that Thomas tell him why people didn’t like him.

 

He was tactless. He didn’t know how to talk to people. He only really talked about history. He was just _weird_.

 

Other people were kind of cruel, he’d decided after that night, after he’d mentioned to someone that he was home-schooled and his entire Monday morning class had known by 9AM on Monday.  He hadn’t been keep the haemophilia a secret for long, not with so many people in close quarters, and he’d started wearing long sleeved shirts all the time when he’d heard someone whispering about the bruises on his arms.

 

The only place he really went other than his classes was the university’s gym. Which reminded him…

 

“At least wear something with short sleeves to the gym,” Thomas said as Nate set aside the book to finish folding the laundry that he’d been neglecting at the kitchen table for almost a week. He was probably just Nate’s friend because they were roommates and because Nate had helped his bandage his hand after he’d cut it on a glass their first week of college. “You should see the bruises some of those guys have.”

 

But Nate stayed covered up, unless he was alone in the room with the door locked, certain that Thomas wouldn’t be back for a while (labs, lectures, nights out that Nate never went on.) Only then did Nate strip to his underwear and examine himself in the mirror, running his hands across his skin to feel where the hollow of his stomach, the skinny sharpness of his arms, are slowly giving way to muscle.

 

He thought about transformations and adventures he would never have.

 

 

 

**21**

 

Her name was Claudia, she was a new bartender at the campus bar, and pretty much every single person Nate had heard mention her in the last month had been talking about how they wanted to sleep with her. He was more than a little surprised when he looked up from his half full glass to see her smiling at him from the other side of the table.

 

“Oh, uh, do you want to clean this table or something?” he asked, looking around for Thomas (who had probably ditched him for a hot girl, despite swearing that he wouldn’t do that yet again). “I can move if you want me to?”

 

Claudia laughed. “I just finished my shift, actually. I was wondering if you wanted to get coffee, or maybe something to eat? I know it’s really late but I’m _starving_.”

 

“Oh.” Nate stared at her for a few seconds, half tempted to ask her why she was asking _him_ out instead of someone else. “Yeah. I’m not really hungry, but do you, uh, do you want to go anywhere specific?”

 

 

 

They ended up in a burger joint halfway been Nate’s apartment and the bar, sharing a burger and fries – if it could be called sharing when Nate ate the pickle, a few friends, and didn’t touch the milkshake again after he got brain freeze from his first gulp.

 

“So,” Claudia said around a mouthful of fries, “what’s your deal?”

 

Nate froze, glancing down at his hands, at the bruise on the back of the left one that had been caused by him being a bit too careless with a book. “What do you mean?”

 

“I mean that you’re not exactly ugly, but I don’t think I’ve seen you hit on a girl, or a girl hit on you, since I started working at the bar. Why not? I know that you don’t smell and that you chew with your mouth closed, and you didn’t stare at my chest or my ass when you saw me, so it’s not because you’re a creep.”

 

Nate picked up another fry and at it as slowly as he could while he tried to work out what to tell her. Be honest, and hope that she still liked him? Lie his ass off and hope that she didn’t find out?

 

“I’m a haemophiliac,” he admitted, keeping his eyes on the plate. “It means-“

 

“It means you have a clotting disorder. That’s it?”

 

“Uh.” Nate forced himself to look at her instead of the plate. “Yes? Usually that and the clotting factor in my apartment put people off. Or I put people off.”

 

“Oh, thank God.” Claudia held out half of the burger for him, and Nate took it, not entirely sure why. “I thought you were going to say you were secretly married or that your idea of fun is, I don’t know, kicking puppies. Please tell me you don’t hate Elvis.”

 

Nate thought of the old poster that he still had rolled up in its tube. “Elvis is one of my favourite musicians ever.”

 

 

 

**28**

 

The dagger looked familiar. It had been annoying him for days, and he’d finally realised why it did at three in the morning. Then he’d had to wait until Gretchen came in at seven before he could even begin to check. Director Logan was going to be happy, though. He’d been talking about keeping Nate on retainer if Nate did go back to college for another degree, since he’d done a lot more than he’d originally been hired to do.

 

Writing guides for exhibits and the pamphlets was okay, but tracking things through history, piecing together information and photos and sketches and stories to work out what had happened, and connect it all together? Way cooler. Nate wanted that to be his actual job, not… whatever was written on the door of the office he shared with seven other people.

 

As long as he found the book.

 

Nate searched through the pile of books, trying to remember which one he’d seen it in. It had definitely been one of the ones on Egyptian anatomical studies, and he’d definitely been a teenager when he’d first read it, but how did a dagger get all the way from Egypt to Scotland? But he definitely wasn’t mistaken. He’d looked at that page a million times as a kid, and he knew the design of the handle

 

“Mr Heywood, need I remind you _again_ that those books are technically museum property until your contract with Director Logan runs out, and many of them would cost you a week’s salary?” Gretchen asked as she peered down at him. “What are you doing this time? The director is going to have a heart attack if you don’t finish the write-up for the bog bodies exhibit before it arrives.”

 

“Finished it last night; it’s great stuff, there are some really gory details that will get people’s attention, and I prepared an alternate version for kids on tours – and I’ve found it!” Nate flipped through the pages until he found the right page held up the book triumphantly with one hand, and grabbed the one he’d been dragging around for days with the other. “Look at them both, tell me you see what I see.”

 

Gretchen looked down her nose at him, but peered at the books, looking slowly between the two sketches. “Oh my Gosh, is that the same dagger?”

 

“Yes, that’s why the team carrying out the excavation doesn’t recognise it, and why the archaeologists can’t agree on whether it should be there or not. It originally came from Egypt!” Nate waved frantically at Director Logan as he saw him entering the library. “Director Logan, I found the dagger that you asked me to identify!”

 

Director Logan smiled as he crossed the room, skirting around a few piles of books that Nate had hastily checked and abandoned. “Already? At this rate, Mr Heywood, I’ll have to pay you extra. You’ve given us a major edge over every other museum in the country—I have a friend in Star City who’s been trying to poach you for months.”

 

“I already blocked his number, but if you fund my master’s, I’ll call every museum in the country and reject them personally,” Nate joked. The one he’d been looking at offered a year abroad in the middle, but there was no way he could afford that without asking Hank for money. And Nate had a list of many painful, and probably fatal things, he’d do before that. Coincidentally, most were things his parents had never let him do as a kid.

 

“If you were planning to work for us afterwards, as well as doing a little research for us during your degree, of course, it would be extremely easy for me to convince some people who donate to fund another degree for our resident expert in historical reconstruction and deduction. Of course, that would only be if you wanted that job.”

 

“I usually think of myself as a time detective,” Nate admitted, ignoring Gretchen’s disgusted expression. “But that sounds like something I can tell people without them thinking that I’m crazy.”

 

Being a time detective was way cooler, though.

 

Director Logan studied the sketch of the dagger. “Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. The craftsmanship is exquisite, even after all these years. I’ll need to make sure that you get to see it personally when it arrives.”

 

 

 

**31**

“Wendy dumped me,” Nate said as soon as Thomas picked up. He let his umbrella lean against his shoulder as he slowed down. “Do you have time to talk?”

 

He was somewhere in Oxford, weaving his way down a cobbled street that was nowhere near Wendy’s place or his. Or the university. In fact, he wasn’t that sure that he’d even walked down this street before. He’d tripped on it ten minutes ago, though, banging a knee against someone’s garden wall.

 

Oh, and he was more than a little drunk. He saw down carefully on the edge of a bench and felt the freezing cold rain soaking into his jeans.

 

“I just put the twins. What was it this time? Did she decide she wants kids? Did she find out about one of your _other_ exes and react badly? Went back to her ex?”

 

Nate grimaced. “That happened once, and I knew I was his rebound fling.”

 

“I wasn’t talking about Jonathan, I was talking about Hannah.”

 

Oh. Hannah. That had sucked. Not as much as Claudia kicking him out because he’d refused to even think about having kids, but way more than Andrew finding out he’d dated Andrew’s cousin.

 

“It wasn’t that, it was…” Nate took a deep breath, but didn’t manage to say anything before he heard a baby begin to cry in the background.

 

Thomas swore quietly.

 

“I’ll call you back later, okay?”

 

And then Nate was left with only dead silence in one ear, and the sound of the rain pounding against the cobbles in the other.

 

He hadn’t been able to say that he loved her. That had been the problem. Wendy had said it four times, and tonight she’d looked at Nate and waited for him to it. Or maybe she’d just been waiting for him to say anything. He hadn’t managed to ask before they’d started arguing.

 

And, the truth was, as much as Nate hated to admit it, he didn’t love Wendy. He hadn’t loved Hannah or Jonathan or Andrew or Claudia either. In fact, he wasn’t sure he loved _anything_ about his life. He enjoyed his job. He enjoyed his field of study.  

 

But none of it made Nate feel alive. The closest he’d come to really loving it had been in dreams where he’d been doing a hundred things that would have killed him. He was a knight, an explorer, a soldier, a superhero, and dozens of other things he couldn’t remember, and he’d been running from people who wanted to kill him, saving the day, saving the _world_.

 

They weren’t that different from the dreams he’d had when he was a kid, although Nate was sure they were more historically accurate now.

 

“This is it, right?” Nate said to himself, looking at the ground, where the cobbles were beginning to disappear under the water. They weather report had warned about flooding. “This is when something happens that gives me all the answers.”

 

He stared at the rain splashing down into the flooding street, and waited for something, anything to happen, holding his breath.

 

When nothing happened after a minute, Nate sighed and got up, hoping that he thought of a better plan on the way home. And that the warm ache in his knee wasn’t a joint bleed, because that would suck.

 

 

 

**37**

 

“Am I right?”

 

Thomas waved the don’t-call-it-a-wand-or-I-will-let-Emily-and-Chloe-paint-your-nail across the book again, and Nate watched it light up bright red again.

 

“This book’s changed,” Thomas said quietly as he waved the wand across more books in the pile that Nate had carefully separated from the rest of his collection. Sometimes it went bright red, sometimes it lit up orange, but it was only green when he picked up a book from the bookcase. “How did you know about this?”

 

“I read all of these books hundreds of times when I was a kid. And then I’d open them, and something wouldn’t look right. The first couple of times, I just closed them and forgot about it. Then I started marking the pages. I’d look at them a few days later and my brain would tell me that they were the same as they’d always been, but they never felt right.” Nate grabbed the book and flipped to the page with a bright orange tab sticking up from the top. “This knight, Sir Raymond of the Palms? He wasn’t there before. This entire section was completely different.”

 

“It’s… impossible.” Thomas put down the wand and picked up his mug of coffee. His hand was shaking. “Nate, if these books have changed, that means that history’s changed. That’s not possible.”

 

Nate gestured towards the window. “Impossible? Look outside. There’s a guy in a red suit with super speed. Star City’s mayor is ‘secretly’ a vigilante. People have superpowers now. Do you really think it’s impossible for time travel to be real? Look, there’s more.” He started to pull more pieces of paper from the files he’d been carefully compiling for the last month. “Look. Here they are again. And again. And again.”

 

A woman in a white outfit. A man with a gun that froze things. A man with a gun that set things on fire. People with wings. A strange looking ship that disappeared.

 

“They call themselves Legends. Time is changing,” Nate grinned. “And they’re changing it.”

 

 

 

“Come on, come on, please,” Nate muttered as he flipped through another book. Nothing. He gave up, tossed it aside, picked up another one, flipped through the pages. Nothing. Again and again and again. Nothing felt off, nothing had changed in _any_ of the books, and nothing had for weeks.

 

He’d watched their numbers change. He’d even managed to draw up some kind of timeline based on who was with them and when. But now, they were all just…. Gone. No Sara Lance. No Ray Palmer.

 

“They’re dead,” Thomas had said when Nate had first told him what was happening.

 

But they couldn’t be. They had to be alive because…

 

Nate stopped halfway through the final book. Because _what_? Because they were supposed to save the world? Because tracking them through time and around the world was the only thing in his life that made anything worth it?

 

And what was he supposed to do to help them, anyway? He’d tracked what he thought was the ship to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean but even Hank didn’t have enough money to get Nate there. Not that he’d ever ask. He’d sold his soul to Director Logan and the museum to get funding for his master’s and then his PhD rather than do that.

 

Nate’s gaze drifted to one of the names on one of the photographs. Oliver Queen. The Green Arrow (obvious to anyone who could use a calendar) and the mayor of Star City. He had the money. He also knew at least two of the members, so he’d want to help them, right?

 

Thomas would kill him. Director Logan would probably think he’d finally lost his mind. His mother would worry. Hank would lecture him on disgracing the family name by embarrassing him.

 

But the Legends needed his help. Even if they were dead, they at least deserved someone noticing and caring.

 

“Okay,” Nate said to himself as he started to gather his findings into something resembling at least some sort of order that would be understandable to someone else.

 

 

 

Nate stood beside the Waverider, completely frozen. There weren’t any dinosaurs visible, but the knowledge that there _were_ dinosaurs was thrilling and terrifying.

 

He was suddenly very conscious of the fact that he didn’t have any clotting factor concentrates with him. Sure, he’d given himself regular infusions for years, but he doubted that dinosaur bites were included under minor bleeds.

 

“This is really the Cretaceous Period,” he managed to say, before doubling over and vomiting.

 

Mick didn’t look very impressed when Nate looked up, but Nate didn’t think that anyone could look impressed with someone after they’d puked their guts up all over the forest floor.

 

“Better be, or I’m taking you back to Robin Hood and swapping you for somebody else,” he said.

 

Nate straightened up, his stomach still churning, but he managed to follow Mick when he started to walk in the direction of what Nate thought was where the tools had been found. “I’m, uh, I’m a bit…”

 

“Scared?” Mick supplied without looking at him.

 

“Terrified.”

 

Mick was quiet as they walked, and Nate had decided that had been the end of their conversation when Mick spoke again.

 

“You want be a hero, Pretty?”

 

Thrown by the nickname, Nate only just managed to say, “Uh, yeah, how did you know?” instead of asking about it. No one had ever given him a nickname before, unless he counted ‘Nate’ which had mainly been because his huge family had always had someone too young to say ‘Nathaniel’ even after he’d been old enough to say it himself.

 

“Because the only people dumb enough to get on that ship and stay are the ones who are there for somebody else, there to be a hero, or there because they don’t have anything else.”

 

“Oh.” Technically, it was a bit of two of them. He’d always wanted to be a hero, yes, but it wasn’t as if he had much to go back to in Central City. A job at the museum. One friend. It was a life, but it had never been the life he’d wanted. This… it was dangerous. Nate could feel the fear in his chest, like a living thing, but he also felt more alive than he’d ever felt before. “Which one are you?”

 

“Guess.”

 

Nate didn’t have time to say anything (he was going to ask if Mick was one of the ones who didn’t have anything else, but a voice that sounded a lot like Thomas was already calling him tactless in his head) before he heard a screeching sound. He turned towards the noise to see…

 

A dinosaur. A real live dinosaur. And it looked like it was chasing a person.

 

Not to mention heading straight for them, unless the man veered off in another direction soon.

 

Nate guessed the man was Ray, and his suspicion was confirmed when Mick was at his side a second later, already raising the heat gun in the direction of the two.

 

“We need to save Haircut’s ass before that thing eats him. Or he tries to adopt a dinosaur as a pet. Come on, Pretty; time to be a hero.”

 

Nate took a deep breath.

 

Time to be a hero.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Candles by Daughter.
> 
> I'm mickroryed over on Tumblr.


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